The Senate Inquiry into the sexualisation of children was tabled in the federal Parliament this week and one of its recommendations was a national approach to sex and relationship education in schools.

Many young people have been complaining that what they're taught in class is not relevant to their lives.

Now researchers from the University of Western Sydney have put together a program that they say will work for 16 to 25-year-olds.

Rape crisis workers say about 70 per cent of sexual assault victims know their attacker and among the remaining 30 per cent, the perpetrator is usually someone they've gone on a date with or met socially.

For the past three years, Associate Professor Moira Carmody from the University of Western Sydney's Social Justice and Social Change Research Centre has been running a program with young people trying to prevent such attacks from occurring.

"They found it very useful in terms of feeling like they were more in charge of what was happening and that it was about negotiating with the other person," she said.

"There were also a number of examples where people talked about being in a club and a bar and say, a young woman was very drunk and this person saw her being led off to a taxi by three guys, and she intervened and took the girl with her and took her home.

"Guys talked about standing up in front of blokes who were really harassing women who were quite drunk in a club and saying,'Back off mate'."

First she interviewed young people about their sexual behaviour, experiences and concerns, then used that information to devise the six-week program that has been run in six communities in Sydney and regional New South Wales.

"It's really about what they're doing because a lot of programs tend to focus just on biology and safe sex, but they don't - as some of the young people said to me, 'They don't tell us how to pick up'," she said.

"They don't tell us how to work out how to do consent, how to communicate with people. Those sort of things were what they were interested in."

As part of the program, the young people did roleplay, were trained to interpret body language, practice standing up to people, raise issues with their friends, and they were encouraged to reflect on their behaviour and expectations.

Associate Professor Carmody says the young people found their new skills useful when they picked up someone in a club or a bar.

"They said, 'Look, this is what I'm kind of interested in, what are you interested in?', so they kind of negotiated before they even got down to the action, so to speak," she said.

"Now this might sound a bit mechanistic and a bit of a passion killer but in fact they didn't experience it that way. They felt very empowered by it and felt they were knowing what they were buying if you like."

The 48 mainly female participants were interviewed at the beginning and end of the program, and then again six months later.

Karen Willis from the New South Wales Rape Crisis Centre says she's supporting the program because it's changed people's behaviour.

"It actually encourages people to talk about what they're doing, to check on their partner to make sure it's OK, to make sure that they are both on same page and they are thinking along the same lines," she said.

"Because certainly a lot of the research suggests that people make mistakes in their assumptions about what other people are wanting and not wanting.

"And we would really like to decrease that because that obviously can lead to criminal as well as unethical behaviour."

Associate Professor Carmody will publish her findings in a book later this year and hopes the program will be adopted in schools, youth centres, universities and TAFE colleges across the country.